Living with confusion

I imagine anyone who’s consulted with Yi must have had the experience. Ask question; receive answer; say ‘Huh??’

And this is where it’s easy to go wrong – where the desire that caused us to ask in the first place won’t accept this lack of clarity, and we find a reason to ask another question, quick. (I touched on this in my post on ‘How long does a reading last?‘ – in response to which Steve Marshall pointed out that answers to big questions can last ten years and more.)

But what if we could accept the confusion? This is a part of divination I’ve learned from Stephen Karcher, as I tend by nature to be in a hurry for answers:

“The other thing is, you know, we all have this great desire, we get an answer, and say, ‘What does that mean?’ There’s always a period of chaos or confusion as that symbol hits your heart-mind and starts rearranging the psychic furniture in there. I think the first step in this matching process is to accept the confusion, to drop into the confusion and start to look around and find pathways. Again to my mind, the more you resonate with the mythic sense of the hexagrams, the more accessible that thought of the heart is, the more easily it can move you, move your heart-mind, so that, as the Dazhuan says, spontaneously the rules emerge. There’s this famous section in Dazhuan that says, you know, this isn’t an army to protect you, this isn’t your guardian, this is as if a beloved ancestor draws near. Take the words into your heart-mind and turn and roll them, let them act on you, and then spontaneously the connections, the rules emerge. And if you’re unwilling to do this, the way won’t unfold, the way will not open. So that to me is a really essential part, that confusion, that giving up of your immediate search for an answer. And the basic faith that if you go there, spontaneously the connections will stick their heads up and emerge, just like the rainmaker in his hut.”

(This is an excerpt from the webinar I did with Stephen in March. Swift plug: the complete recording and transcript of this session are still available.)

It’s true that, on occasion, the answer will jump off the page at you. But more often, there has to be a period where you spread out the reading in front of you, look at the connected hexagrams, texts, or whatever you choose to look at, and don’t know what it means. The trick of it – the lesson of Hexagram 4, Not Knowing – is not to be in such an anxious hurry to make the uncertainty go away.

What started me off on this entry was a very good post at Chris Jackson’s Abundance Site blog about getting ‘comfortable with uncertainty’. The basic idea seems to be that while we perceive things as always ‘on’, moving along continuous lines through time and space (and logical cause and effect), behind and between this are the spaces where things are ‘off’, like the differences between successive images in a reel of film. This is a discontinous realm where there is non-local correlation, where things are connected instantaneously rather than only in succession. (If this summary is unintelligible, as it likely is, try the article by Deepak Chopra that inspired Chris Jackson’s post.) And maybe this is the place Yi’s answers come from.